Alan Richman's Wine Guide: Beer

OK, so it's not wine. But our wine expert has been converted. Here, everything you need to know about a different sort of sophisticated bubbly beverage to pair with your dinner. Plus, 10 beers you won't want to miss, and one to avoid like the plague

I set out as a single-minded investigative reporter, my mission to determine if beer-by-the-bottle (or on tap) was a smarter choice in restaurants than wine-by-the-glass. Less than two weeks later, I found myself sitting in Café D’Alsace on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, eating escargots and moules frites, happily swilling glass-after-glass of palate-altering ales and lagers, many of them made in America. I was literally foaming at the mouth with pleasure.

Allow me to reveal a great truth: I have seen the future, and sometimes it makes you belch.

By profession and by choice, I have been a wine guy. Until Sam Adams, the Boston lager, was created in the eighties, I probably hadn’t drunk a dozen glasses of beer in my life. I didn’t like the taste of beer and I thought less of the culture of beer, which featured Germans lounging in lederhosen and Americans participating in pub crawls.

Sam Adams, creamier and more palatable than any beer I’d tasted, got my attention and upped my consumption to about a half-dozen bottles a year. Then, in the 21st century (thank goodness we have something to like about the 21st century) the craft beer movement came into our lives. Right now, nothing in America in the field of food-and-drink is as impressive and as ambitious as what is taking place with beer.

I didn’t know that when I set out on my investigation. I was motivated primarily by the unseemly prices of wine-by-the-glass in New York restaurants, Bourgogne Blanc for $20, C&#xF4;tes du Rh&#xF4;ne for $17. In effect, what restaurants do is buy passable wine at wholesale prices and charge the price they paid for the bottle for every glass they sell. Wine-by-the glass is not about pleasing customers; it’s about thrilling bookkeepers.

At the same time, I had begun seeing fascinating beers, although I couldn’t tell you much about them except that they cost as little as $6 a glass, $7 a bottle. As I said, I was a beer novice, and I suppose I still am, although I must have tasted close to a hundred beers in that two-week span.

I now know a little something about beer: There are lagers, probably at their best in Germany. There are ales, probably at their best in Belgium, although that statement will surely annoy the Brits. Every other kind of beer is a subcategory. The craft beers made in America tend to be ales. That’s as much data as I feel qualified to pass along.

Back when I was still in investigative mode, I started my research at Buvette, a sweet (if pricy) Greenwich Village spot recently opened by Jody Williams. It has little tables to hold little dishes, most of them tasty—a special of rabbit in mustard sauce is particularly alluring, should it be offered when you go there. I first looked at the wines-by-the-glass. That required scanning the entire list because they aren’t listed separately. Call that wine annoyance number one. (I learned later that some were behind me on a blackboard I couldn’t see.) I selected and ordered three glasses of wine.

Ten minutes later, the waiter returned to say he didn’t have two of them. Wine annoyance number two. He recommended substitutes. I agreed, not wanting to go through the list again. He came back with the three bottles and three empty glasses—pouring wines tableside is a nice touch. The first, an Alsatian Riesling that had replaced the unavailable Italian Sylvaner, was corked, and horribly so. Wine annoyance number three. What was more dreadful is the bottle wasn’t full, which meant the restaurant had already served a glass of this undrinkable wine to some other person. That’s not annoying; that’s appalling.

I asked him, joking, if possibly the cook had downed it. He replied, cheerfully, "No, but maybe he put it in the mussels." He brought another bottle, newly opened, and it was wonderful, aromatic and gorgeously balanced. The wine was a 2005 W. Gisselbrecht Riesling Muenchberg, should you be interested.

A decent Sancerre rouge replaced the red that wasn’t available. Our third wine by the glass was a pleasing Rosé made from the Lagrein grape. Still, I was pretty frustrated by the time I got those wines, and the price of all three was $41. Wine annoyance number four. By now I was convinced that wine-by-the-glass is a pain-in-the-ass.

I ordered three beers, none exceptional but all satisfactory. The cost: $21. I tried both the wines and the beers with two starters, cold prawns and a hazelnut pesto tartine. Only the Rosé was an excellent match for both dishes. The beers were fine with the prawns, great with the tart.

My next stop was the restaurant Colonie, in Brooklyn Heights, where a young chef I admire, Brad McDonald, had just taken over the kitchen. The glasses of wines I ordered there were merely okay, with the exception of a surprisingly delicious and full-bodied Chenin Blanc from Paumanok in New York. It cost $12. The beers served there were outrageously good, and none cost more than $8.

Here’s another bonus that comes with beer drinking. It seems to me that young waiters—and are there any other kinds these days?—have become fascinated by beer programs. I suspect they don’t feel quite the same about wine, perceiving it to be old-school and financially out-of-reach. Beer is neither, even if it’s probably the world’s oldest alcoholic beverage. Also, beer doesn’t require familiarity with a list containing hundreds of selections, as wine often does. Our server at Colonie, Rachel, paired a different beer with each dish, and she did so beautifully—Full Sail Session Lager with crostini, Ommegang Rare Vos with charcuterie (astonishing head cheese, emplary rabbit-and-foie-gras paté), Smuttynose IPA with pristine spring-pea agnolotti, Flying Dog Gonzo Imperial Porter with cotechino (an Italian-style salami, here braised in red wine).

That convinced me. After two stops, my great scientific study was done. The overwhelming winner, for every reason imaginable, was beer. What I did after that was drink beer all over the city.

Rachel directed me to a young fellow named Gianni Cavicchi, who is the beer sommelier at Café D’Alsace, where the chef is Philippe Roussel, one of the great veterans of French cooking in New York. Cavicchi talked me into visiting a Belgium beer festival in New York, and then he had me come by the restaurant and taste styles of beer I never imagined existed, including a shot of Sam Adams Utopias, which is beer aged 12-16 years in whiskey casks and drunk like a brandy. (The nose was somewhat maderized, the flavor somewhere between port and Cognac, and the acidity profound.) I have to say, with all due respect to that guy in the commercial, Cavicchi has to be the most interesting beer-drinker in the world.

The Utopias was easily the most unusual beer I tasted, not that it tasted much like a beer. It also gave me a sense of pride. After all, hadn’t I discovered decades ago that Sam Adams was going to make the world a better place to drink?

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